


Mousetrap

by BibliovoreOrc



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Fantasy, Fanwalkers (Magic: The Gathering), Gen, Ravnica (Magic: The Gathering), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23233465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BibliovoreOrc/pseuds/BibliovoreOrc
Summary: Mouse steals secrets — for a price. But a routine job in New Pravh soon takes a nasty turn.
Kudos: 4





	Mousetrap

Mouse knew that she must have had a name, once, but there was no one left alive who could have told her what it was, and, anyway, for as long as she could remember, everyone had just called her Mouse, so Mouse was who she was.

That moniker had been bestowed on her by the wardens of the charity home, and, from the tones in which they had uttered it – usually while dragging her out by the ear from some place in which they had found her, and where she was not meant to be – it was not a term of endearment. “She’s like a bloody mouse,” the sister supreme had once said, as one of her wardens had beaten Mouse with a strap. “I don’t know how she gets into these places.”

Mouse had spent the next fortnight sleeping on her belly, and the name had stuck.

She couldn’t explain how she did it, but Mouse had always had a knack for getting into tight spaces. It didn’t matter how small the gap was – just a keyhole, or a crack, or the strip of light beneath the locked pantry door – as long as she could see the opening, she could pass through it, and find herself on the other side. It was a good trick, and she had used it to good effect. On the nights when the wardens sent her to bed without supper – and there were many such nights, because, in Mouse’s recollection, she was always being punished for something – she would sneak out of bed after dark, and let herself into the biscuit larder, even though the sister supreme kept the only key. Mouse had performed that trick so many times that the wardens actually began to wonder just how a growing girl deprived of so many meals could look as well-fed as she did, and that suspicion was what had gotten her caught in the first place. From then on in, Mouse had learned to be more careful – to only eat as much as she needed to survive, and to clean up the crumbs after. Another time, one of the boys had stolen Mouse’s hairbrush, and refused to give it back. He didn’t have any use for it, either – he was just stealing it because he could. So, the next day, while the boys were busy working the treadmill, Mouse had let herself into the boys bunkroom – which was strictly forbidden – and had stolen the brush back. She had also left a trapdoor spider – which she had found living in one of the privies – beneath the boy’s bedsheet. His screaming that night had woken the whole house, and he’d lost three of his toes to the venom.

After that, Mouse didn’t mind so much being called Mouse.

Nowadays, Mouse understood that what she did was magic, although it wasn’t conscious magic – it wasn’t like she ever spoke a charm, or cast a spell. She just saw a space between two things, decided to pass herself through it, and did. It was no more effortful than breathing, or throwing a ball, and, just as she couldn’t have described in any detail the way her muscles moved to let her climb a staircase, she couldn’t articulate the precise way by which her mouseomancy allowed her to pass her whole body through a keyhole too small to fit the tip of her little finger into. It was natural, and instinctive – it was just something she did. The fact that it was something other people didn’t do – couldn’t do – had come as a surprise to her at first. When she had told another of the girls at the charity home about it – a girl she had trusted, had thought was her friend – the girl hadn’t known it was magic, either. She had simply screamed “witch!” at the top of her lungs, and gone to tell the wardens.

The wardens hadn’t believed the girl’s story, but they still gave both Mouse and the girl an almighty beating.

Mouse learned two lessons that day. First, that she was not normal. Second, that there was no one she could trust.

After she had grown older, and aged out of the charity house, Mouse had discovered that the same skill which had kept her fed in the institution could keep her fed in the outside world as well. At first, she lived hand-to-mouth, stealing food when she needed to eat, warmer clothes when the weather grew cold, and the occasional silver or gold trinket, when something she saw caught her eye. At night, she would let herself into disused buildings to sleep, and, by day, she mostly kept to the shadows. The Boros guards got onto her a few times, when the disused buildings she let herself into turned out to be less disused than they had looked from the outside, but the guards were big, and slow, and Mouse was small, and quick, and impossible to catch. Even if one of the wojeks had managed to put her in irons, she would have slipped right out again. Either way, she never was caught.

Over time, Mouse came to realize that there were other people in the city who also wanted things stolen, too, but who had far less capacity to act on those urges than she. Some people wanted jewelry, others wanted gold. But the most valuable things of all were secrets. And, unlike gold or jewelry, you could steal a secret, and the owner would never even know it was gone.

Stealing secrets was a good business. A very good business. And Mouse was very good at it.

Once she had cottoned on to this trade, it didn’t take Mouse long to realize that she could live more comfortably – and less precariously – than sleeping in condemned hovels, and stealing from the sweets-sellers when their backs were turned. There was the small problem of her name, which did not set quite the right tone, but that was soon enough dealt with. And thus did the girl from the charity home – who the wardens called Mouse – become known to all the very best black marketeers as the Stealer of Secrets, even if she remained forever Mouse within the privacy of her own mind.

(Art by Michael C. Hayes)

Mouse took her time, established her reputation, and made it a point to never betray a customer’s interests. She built a network of contacts, and filled her black book with brokers, but she never let anyone close. It didn’t take long for the guilds to make themselves known to her, whether through shadowy intermediaries or public denunciations. Some of the guilds put bounties on her head. Some of them offered her jobs. She turned them all down. She was doing just fine on her own. Ravnica was a city that ran on secrets, and Mouse knew how to get them.

Besides, Mouse knew she was not normal, and there was no one she could trust.

* * *

The job had been going well, so far, but not too well, and Mouse usually had a sense for when a job was going too well. Security was tight this far into New Prahv, but security in New Prahv mostly meant a lot of locked doors, and locked doors were no problem for Mouse. There were pressure plates, too, concealed beneath the marble floors, and rigged to spring gods-only-knew what sorts of traps if triggered, but those were no problem, either – Mouse simply watched the guards, made a note of the tiles on the floor where they conspicuously did not step, and made sure that those were the tiles where she did not step, too.

There were quite a lot of guards, but, in Mouse’s book, that was no bad thing. A lot of guards in a place meant that most people weren’t stupid enough to try to break in, and guards in a place where no one was stupid enough to try to break in tended to get bored, and complacent. Mouse had once been told that the Azorius punishment for dereliction was a fortnight in the stockade, but the guards in the copyists’ archive chatted idly among themselves, and talked about diversion clubs and the griffon races, and it was not hard for Mouse to escape their notice. She could make herself hard to see when it suited her not to be seen, and she could move as quietly as her namesake. Her leather armor was soft and supple, with what few buckles there were kept conscientiously greased, and there were felt pads on the soles of her feet. Years of breaking curfew had taught Mouse the art of moving unnoticed, and the New Prahv arresters were no match for the charity house wardens. The sister supreme had had sharper eyes than any guild guard Mouse had yet seen.

The scroll Mouse was after was in a stone and steel vault, but the vaults had to be kept open during the day, so that the copyists could get in and out. And, sure enough, when Mouse peered around the final corner, to where she knew the most valuable codices were kept, she found the door standing wide open, and the guard picking lint from his tabard. Something about that did raise a hackle – there was easy, and then there was too easy – but the guard’s nonchalance seemed born of genuine boredom, not feigned, and the copyists who periodically went in and out of the vault were brusque and officious, as copyists tended to be. They went about their business as though Mouse were not there, and, as Mouse waited patiently for her opening, she felt the danger signs recede. Hidden behind a statue in a little sconce in the wall, she kept careful count of how many scribes went in, versus how many came back out, and, when her arithmetic at last zeroed, indicating that the vault was empty, Mouse slipped past the guard as though he weren’t there, and let herself in.

The interior of the chamber was dark – the last copyist out must have doused the magelight – and Mouse was prepared to wait a second for her eyes to adjust. Before she could, though, the runes on the stone ceiling suddenly flared blue-white, and Mouse had to put a hand up before her eyes to keep from being blinded. When her blinking stopped, and her sight came back to her, she saw that the vault had been emptied of its copying tables, and its racks of scrolls. Instead, a score of hooded figures stood in neat ranks around the room’s perimeter, clothed in the heavy robes of Azorius scribes. Only the members of this silent jury looked taller than most scribes Mouse had seen – and conspicuously broad-shouldered, too. The reason for this became clear a moment later, when, in response to some unspoken command, the figures all drew their hoods back, and let their robes fall to the floor, revealing the shining Azorius plate beneath their oversized disguises.

 _Leave it to the Azorius,_ Mouse thought to herself. _Polished to a spit-shine, even for an ambush._

The front rank of arresters took a step towards her, then, while Mouse took a matching step back. She didn’t dare turn around to see, but she could sense that armored bodies now stood between her and the door.

“Sorry if I spoiled your surprise party,” she said, offering her most impish smile to the guard in sergeant’s stripes. “I seem to have missed the invitation.”

Mouse took careful note of her footing, and did her best to gauge distances, although she did not look down.

“So,” she said, “who are we waiting for?”

The guard in the sergeant’s stripes said, “seize her!” And the first rank of arresters all charged.

Mouse took a step backwards, only to have gauntleted hands grab her arms from behind. The arrester’s grip was like iron, as the guard tried to wrench Mouse’s arms around behind her back, but Mouse almost laughed as she simply slipped free from the vise-like hold, as though she had never been there at all. The ease of her escape seemed to startle the arrester so much that he didn’t even react as Mouse spun on the balls of her feet and hit him square in the solar plexus.

It was not a fair fight – twenty on one – but Mouse was nimble, and she was quick, and the arresters struggled to grasp that they couldn’t hold her. Furthermore, there were a lot of bodies jockeying for space in a small, echoing room, and Azorius plate was designed more for imposing good looks than for practicality in combat. The arresters could barely turn their heads side to side, let alone reach around behind themselves, and so Mouse darted between them, weaving right and left, trying to keep to the nearest guard’s blindside, getting in the occasional blow when the opportunity presented itself. The guard in the sergeant’s stripes took off his helmet, to try to widen his field of vision, and Mouse caught him with an open palm across the bridge of his nose. He went down, cursing angrily and holding his face, yelling through clenched teeth at his men to get their hands on her. Another arrester went low, trying to sweep Mouse’s legs, but Mouse vaulted over her like a pommel horse, and caught her with a hard kick to the backside, which sent her sprawling to the floor with a clatter of invective and metal.

The arresters had not drawn their weapons. That was good news, at least, Mouse reckoned. Their orders didn’t seem to be to kill her.

However, even advantaged though she was, twenty on one was not winning arithmetic, and, having collected herself after the shock of being ambushed, Mouse’s thoughts turned from fight, to flight. If she could get through the vault door, and out into the warren of corridors beyond, even all the guards in New Prahv would have a devil of a time catching her. She just needed to get out.

In the initial rush of the fight, Mouse had lost her bearings. It took her a second to reorient herself, and to find the door, during which time a gauntleted fist caught her a glancing blow across the temple, and for a second, Mouse’s head swam, and she saw stars. But then there was the door, straight in front of her – standing as wide open as before – and, without pausing to say her goodbyes, Mouse set off for it at a dead sprint, and threw herself at the opening.

The impact was like hitting a brick wall.

At the moment when Mouse’s body would have flown across the threshold, bright blue energy crackled across the doorframe, and arcane sigils flashed in the air. Mouse hit the barrier going full force, and it stopped her like a hammer blow. She bounced off the magic barrier, tumbled backwards, and went down hard. Her head hit the marble with a sickening crack, and then the whole room was spinning, and her mouth was filled with blood. She was choking on it, drowning in the stuff, and, at first she thought she was dying, until, through the red haze that clouded her mind, she realized dimly that she wasn’t run through, but had bit her own tongue.

In the space between the open doorway, the detention barrier crackled and hissed.

Mouse felt rough hands picking her up, dragging her to her feet. Again, someone with a vice-like grip was twisting her arms around behind her, only, this time, Mouse’s head was too muddled to resist. She waited for the kiss of cold iron around her wrists – that was no big deal, she could escape later easily enough – but instead what she felt was a strange, coiling energy, which wrapped itself around her arms, then pulled itself tight, like an electric serpent. And that was when, for the first time, Mouse noticed the pair of lawmages standing above her, one on each side, who were weaving their detention magic around her. They must have been waiting out in the hallway, Mouse realized with a start. Waiting for her to break for the door, so that they could raise the energy barrier, and trap her inside. Now they had joined the arresters inside the vault, and were doing the heavy work of bringing her to heel.

With a sense of panic rising in her stomach, Mouse trashed against the hands that were holding her, and, with every ounce of fight she had left, she tried to mouse her way out of the magical bonds. But chains of mana were not like chains of metal, and, just as the detention barrier had stopped her when no door ever could, the lawmage’s arcane manacles held her fast, and would not let her slip through.

“No, no, no!” Mouse started to scream, spitting blood from her mouth as she fought to get free. “What do you want from me? What did I ever do to you?”

The arrester with the sergeant’s stripe – with a cold-looking grin on his face, even as blood dripped from his broken nose – stepped forward from the ranks, and, producing a warrant from his satchel, he unfurled the long, carefully-lettered scroll, and read out the charges against her.

Mouse heard the indictments as though through a haze. Some of the crimes the man listed she definitely did commit. Some of the others Mouse had never even heard of, but it seemed useless to protest. She was too overwhelmed by anger, too blinded by rage, and, at any rate, the verdict had already been rendered. The Azorius did not send twenty arresters and two lawmages to deliver a suspect for trial. What was happening now was a sentencing, and all that remained was the execution.

Mouse was determined to struggle to the last. She lashed out at the guards trying to hold her with every trick she had. With her legs, she kicked; with her hands, she scratched – she even snapped her head backwards, hoping to headbutt the man behind her. But it was all useless. Even if she could have somehow gotten purchase, the detention spells around her wrists held fast, and the bright blue barrier across the doorway crackled and hummed.

The sergeant had stopped speaking. He had come to the end of his list. He looked Mouse in the eyes. “Does the prisoner have anything to say for herself?” he asked.

“I do,” Mouse said, and she spat the mouthful of blood she had been saving up straight into the sergeant’s face.

She had time for one, good, cathartic laugh, before something hit her across the back of the head, hard, and she slumped down to the ground.

The last thing Mouse remembered before darkness closed in around her was the sound of metal footsteps marching out of the vault, followed by a whoosh of air as the door swung closed, and the roar of a konstructor’s torch. Mouse listened to the hiss of metal fusing metal from the other side of the door, and she barely had time to register the sound’s ominous portent, before she felt herself sink down into oblivion, and then she didn’t feel anything at all.

* * *

The human eye adjusts remarkably to partial darkness. Given enough time to acclimate, and even the faintest glimmer to see by, the eye’s surroundings will reveal themselves over time, and resolve into recognizable shapes.

But Mouse did not awaken to partial darkness. When Mouse came to, and found her way unsteadily to her feet, she found herself engulfed by complete and total darkness. This darkness was not the kind that comes with insufficient light – this darkness was the kind of darkness only comes from the total absence of light, and, no matter how long Mouse gave her senses to adjust, no matter how desperately she rubbed her eyes and blinked, the darkness that surrounded her was inky, and complete. She held a hand just in front of her face, and saw nothing – not a shape, not a glimpse, not a glimmer. Darkness was something she normally associated with quiet, but, somehow, this darkness felt loud. It seemed to ring in her ears, it seemed to cloud all her senses. It felt heavy, and claustrophobic, until she was afraid she would suffocate, or go mad from the sheer terror of it.

Mouse screamed as loud as she could possibly scream, and the sounds of her screaming echoed from the marble walls, until she felt as though the voices she heard were not her own. So she screamed again, and again, and again, until there was no breath left in her lungs, and then, as the echoes died down, and she lay panting on the floor, she felt strangely better. Screaming had not accomplished anything, but it had least proved to her that she was still alive, that she had not disappeared into the inky, black nothing which was now her whole world.

Mouse screamed one more time, for reassurance. Then she got back up on her hands and knees, and she started to crawl.

She couldn’t see where she was going, so she didn’t bother to worry about direction. She just crawled. Her wrists were free – that was a positive development, at least – although Mouse suspected she had been released from her magical restraints solely because Azorius detention spells gave off light, and so their removal was less an act of mercy than of malice. Still, Mouse crawled, feeling carefully in front of her with her hands until she got to the wall, and, having gotten there, she turned to her right and crawled parallel with the cold, stone wall, following the angle where it met the floor, and probing with her fingers for gaps or cracks as she went along.

Eventually, she got to the door, where, as soon as her fingertips brushed against the join between the door and the frame, she felt her worst fears coming true. The sound she had heard before passing out had been a konstructor’s torch, welding the vault door closed from the outside. While there was still a gap between door and doorframe on her side of the vault, the metal had been fused together on the outside, and the gap did not go all the way through. There was no way that Mouse could slip through the door, because there was no crack left for her to slip through.

The Azorius had shut her inside. That was her sentence.

The punishment for her crimes was death, and this vault was to be her tomb.

Eventually, Mouse thought grimly, the hieromancers would unseal the vault, and reclaim the space within. New Prahv was a busy place, and real estate was too valuable to abandon in perpetuity. Mouse wondered what whoever reopened the vault would find when they did. She imagined herself as a withered, emaciated corpse, curled into a ball in one corner, dead from starvation.

 _No,_ Mouse corrected herself. _Not starvation. Suffocation._ The vault was airtight. She would suffocate long before she starved.

Mouse was not sure whether that was better, or worse.

How much air did she have? How large was the room? How long before she breathed it all in? For a minute, Mouse tried to do the math, before she realized the absurdity of the problem. She didn’t know half the information she needed to know to make anything remotely beyond a wild guess, and, anyway, what did it all matter? Whether she lived for another three hours, or another three days, when the end came, the end came, and she would find herself equally dead, unless she found some way to escape. And escaping was what Mouse was best at.

So that was all there was to it. She had to think. She had to keep calm.

She had to find a way out.

Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else.

Escape was all that existed.

Carefully – painstakingly – Mouse felt her war around all four sides of the door. Her expert fingers probed every millimeter, every crack – testing, feeling, sensing, searching for any spot between the door and the frame where the weld was not true, where even a hair’s breadth of a gap remained. That was all she needed – a hair’s breadth of a gap. If the konstructor had made even the slightest mistake, had cut even the smallest corner, Mouse could mouse through.

But there was no mistake. There was no crack to be found. All the way around the door, the weld had been solid and true. The metal was fused shut. There was no opening for her to escape through.

Mouse felt her way along the door again. She double-checked her feelings, triple-checked them, but it was the same thing each time. She ran her fingers along the inside of the door until she found the spot where the keyhole should have been, but that was welded shut, too. She double-checked the keyhole, then triple-checked, but nothing changed. The situation was still as hopeless as ever.

The konstructors had done their job. Mouse swore at the top of her voice, and thought murderous thoughts about Azorius officiousness, in all its box-checking pedantry.

She was going to die – in the dark, alone – because some konstructor was afraid of a negative review from his superiors, and had double-checked his welds.

Mouse swore again. It made her feel better, but it did no good.

Silently, quietly, Mouse let herself sink down to the ground, and lay with her back against the door. She held her head in her hands, and allowed herself to wonder what the end would be like, when it came. Would it hurt? Would she even realize it was happening? Or would she pass out long before, as her lungs ran out of good air, so that, when her final breath came, she would draw it blissfully unaware.

Mouse thought about the scare stories she’d been told in the home, about people who the Golgari had buried alive, and how they’d worn their fingers down to bloody stumps, trying to scratch their way out of their coffins. Idly – almost academically – Mouse wondered if she would go mad, if the hieromancers would find her with bloody stumps for fingers when they cut open the vault. Mouse didn’t think so. She resolved she would kill herself before it came to that, and, anyway, the walls of the vault were smooth, polished stone, and would be very hard to scratch.

Mouse closed her eyes, and sighed.

The darkness was doing strange things to her. She had almost gotten used to it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you got used to. It was deeply strange, to close your eyes, and to not see any less well than you had before. It made Mouse feel suddenly very small, and very alone, like a tiny, infinitesimal spark, floating alone through the infinite blackness of space, without even the starlight to guide her, or the city sounds and smells to beckon her home. She felt, for a moment, as though the floor were dissolving beneath her, as though the vault were melting all around her, until it was just her, alone, in the empty vastness of eternity, carried along by the twin tides of fate, and misfortune.

And that was when she felt it.

Not felt, really, so much as sensed, or knew. She felt it the same way she had first felt that she could go where others could not, that she could fit through spaces that others could not fit through. She knew what she had to do, and how she had to do it, the same way that she knew how to walk, or to breathe, which was to say that she knew it without knowing it at all.

Sitting there, alone, in the close and lonely darkness, Mouse felt herself battered by the twin shocks of successive revelations: first, that there was not just one world, but worlds upon worlds – a vast, infinite multiverse of worlds – and, second, that there was space in between those worlds – a gap in the very fabric of existence, like the strip of light beneath the closed pantry door. She didn’t know how she knew these things, but she knew them, and Mouse realized with a start that she had always known them, had always sensed them, but had just never been able to put that knowing into words before now.

With her eyes closed, and her fists squeezed tight, Mouse reached out with her senses. She reached out for that space between worlds, felt for it with the ends of her mind the same way she had felt for the gap beneath the door with the tips of her fingers. And – suddenly – there it was: that strip of light beneath the door, that place between worlds, at once both completely dark, and impossibly bright. The Blind Eternities – that was what they were called. She knew that now, without knowing why. Impossible to see, but possible to feel, to sense.

Mouse could feel it. Mouse could sense it. She ran her aethereal fingertips across the gap between worlds, and, as she had done all her life, she put her mind on the gap, and she squeezed herself through.

* * *

The world on the other side of the crack was warm, and dry, and impossibly bright. After the darkness of the vault, the sun dazzled Mouse’s eyes, and there was so much of it. It beat down from above, oppressive and hot, and it beat up from below as well. There was sand beneath her feet – sand as far as her eyes could see – sand that shimmered like glass beneath the alien sun, reflecting its light and heat back up to the sky, so that Mouse felt cooked from both above and below.

Mouse felt hot, and dry, and practically blind, and she had never felt better in her life.

Mouse had no idea where she was. All she knew was that she was not in the vault. All she knew was that she was not going to die. At least not yet.

She had moused through the gap between planes. She was on an entirely different world from the one she had been born on, the one had lived her whole life on, the one had taken for granted was the only world in all existence.

Mouse didn’t understand what she had done, but she knew it was not normal. Normal people did not fit through the gaps between worlds.

Mouse knew was that she was not normal, and that – wherever she was – there was no one that she could trust.

That was just fine. She would deal with those problems in time.

For now, she focused on putting one foot in front of another, as she made her way across shimmering sand, to the distant, flickering horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> Magic: The Gathering is the property of Wizards of the Coast. This is a transformative work of fanfiction, protected in the United States under the laws of Fair Use.
> 
> All works copyright their respective creators.


End file.
